 All right, welcome back everyone. So we are going to delve right back into our next speaker who is Marcia Abenhus, Professor Marcia Abenhus, who is joining us all the way from New Zealand where I believe is very early in the morning, so I really do appreciate that you that you are here with us. So short bio on Marcia, she's a professor in modern history at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has published widely on the history of war, peace, neutrality and internationalism, including the art of staying neutral, the Netherlands in the First World War, an age of neutrals, great power politics 1815 to 1914, the Hague conferences in international politics 1898 to 1915, and the first age of industrial globalization on international history 1815 to 1918. Her forthcoming co-authored book, Global War, Global Catastrophe, Neutrals, the Ligerands and the Transformation of the First World War, is due out in October this year. At present, she is working on global history of the Dum Dum bullet, and I can definitely recommend her work as absolutely stellar and really fun to read. So without further ado, Marcia, please. Thank you so much, Lauren. Sorry, Anna, I am very, very tired. Well, just not quite awake, so I'm going to launch right in and hope that the coffee that I've just had and the paper will get me going. I'm so grateful to be able to be here today, even at this distance and even so early in the morning, and I'm very sorry I missed so many of your wonderful papers. Anyway, here we go. Here's my screen. My paper today is something of an overview of the history of neutrality in maritime law from 1853 on, and really what I'm trying to do here is to discuss the confluence of three key 19th century developments. The first one is the relative lack of formal naval warfare across this century. The second, the opening of the world's seas and oceans to an enormous amount of shipping as well as to the laying of sub-oceanic telecommunications cables. And the third was the notable commitment expressed by all the great powers of the time to protect and promote the neutral rights of non-collegiate goods and ships in time of war. And I want to kind of unpack the confluence a little by looking at why there was a commitment to standardizing neutrality law by the great powers. So in all three points, the 1815-1914 era differs significantly from the European early modern period, the Napoleonic Wars, including the War of 1812 and the First World War. In those times of conflict, the principle might makes right, largely determined that belligerent rights to monitor, intercept, and seize neutral cargo, crews, and vessels tended to overrule the rights claimed by neutrals to protect their access to the seas and to neutral and enemy ports. In the 19th century, however, the mighty east of naval powers, Great Britain, not only embraced neutrality as a frequently adopted foreign policy, thereby enabling it to avoid going to war when others did, but it increasingly did so at the expense of many, although certainly not all, its maritime rights. And Britain was not alone. Most of the naval powers of the age followed suit, negotiating and adopting a range of new international laws of war that protected the rights of neutrals, in this sense might made neutral right in the 19th century world. So as I've argued elsewhere, and not least in these two books, the great power shift to neutrality practices began with the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The Crimean War offered the first potential challenge to these practices, or the first major challenge to these practices, as the first major interstate war fought between more than two great powers, the conflict's belligerents, Russia on one side, France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire on the other, were in a strong position to uphold the belligerent practices of their early modern past. Yet from the outset of these hostilities, Britain, France and Russia agreed not only to renounce the use of privateers, but also to limit their economic warfare campaigns against their enemy. Effectively, the British and French sustained only a few limited blockades of particular Russian ports, and in general lift the trade of the world's many neutrals alone, or try to maximise it for themselves. By localising the enable engagements in these ways, the belligerents collectively protected their relationship with key neutrals, including Prussia, the Habsburgs and the United States, and kept their own mercantile and passenger shipping routes open, which is not a small thing given the concurrence of the war with major migration shifts, including here to New Zealand, the global gold rushes, and the appeal of avoiding an economic war fought on the seas. Therefore, it was clear to many. Thus, during the Crimean War, neutral rights trumped belligency, and did so very much so at the behest of the war in great powers. This is not to say that the move away from aggressive maritime warfare was all that popular, and certainly not in Britain. As the Conservative MP, J. G. Fillmore, explained in the British Parliament in 1855, the principle of free ships make free goods, namely that enemy goods found on neutral vessels would be or should be immune from capture unless they were clearly contraband. He claimed that this concept made war according to Fillmore the harvest of neutral nations, and gave those neutrals real interest in prolonging any conflict. Furthermore, as he put it, it was a mistaken humanity to suppose that a nation could carry on a maritime war, and at the same time allow their enemy the advantages of peace. Yet Fillmore's point of protest, which came from a deep-seated belief in the need to protect the powers of the Royal Navy, was exactly the principle that many Britons, and certainly those Britons with interest in expanding their own global wealth and investments and their imperial interests, wished to protect. And after the Crimean War, Britain successfully avoided going to war with another naval power for nearly 60 years until August 1914, in fact, when it declared war on Germany. And these Victorians fully understood they had everything to gain, or at least thought they understood they had everything to gain if they were neutral while others went to war. Between 1853 and 1914, then, as the American Rear Admiral and Legal Scholar C. H. Stockton explained, most of the interstate wars that were fought sustained a rather anomalous separation between the military war and the general condition of a global commercial peace. Stockton's conceptualization of limited warfare is a situation in which the global economy operated almost uninhibited by the occurrence of a military or naval conflict is essential to understanding the global contours of the 19th century era of industrial imperialism. For in this era of limited war, and I've purposely put that in quotation marks, of course, there was lots of very violent war, but limited warfare in the sense means that these wars were occurred frequently, but were almost always constrained geographically and economically by the neutrality declarations of other states, many of which were great powers. Furthermore, neutrals were almost always in the majority during these wars, and thus the assertion of neutral rights, as opposed to belligerent rights, came to predominate much of this shift to these limited warfare practices and the rethinking of the role of Navy's at sea that depend on Britain. So I'm trying to contend here that the shift away from the might-makes-right premises that sat at the heart of much early modern maritime warfare, although it was highly contested during that time, particularly when conducted by the British in the Atlantic world, shifted fundamentally with the Crimean War. In its place, the industrializing states who dominated the international system renegotiated the laws of war, particularly with an eye to standardizing the much contested concept of neutrality and concomitantly protecting their own interests as neutrals. Across the centuries, of course, the principle of neutrality from the fulcrum of the regulation of maritime and economic warfare, who could trade with whom and what could they legitimately carry across the seas. The policing of economic warfare was almost always done at sea by the belligerents and relied on the interpretation of key principles in pre-legal principles. Throughout the pre-1815 period, neutral states proclaimed the right to trade unhindered. The free ships make free goods claim. Some even suggested that private properties should be free from belligerent capture altogether. The United States would continue to proclaim this through the 19th century. They certainly demanded that contraband should be defined and that belligerent blockades were only binding on neutrals when they were effectively sustained at the entrance of a port. In response and depending on circumstances, early modern belligerent powers were keen to defend their right to capture enemy goods, even when carried on a neutral vessel. The right to issue letters of mark to privateers and at bare minimum to itemise contraband imposed the principle of continuous voyage and to sustain blockades by declaring them in name only. The Crimean War, we see a clear shift in these practices. And most importantly, because at the end of the conflict, some of them were codified in the 1856 declaration of Paris. Now, as Olaf Richter described them in 1965, the declaration was the most remarkable of milestones that marked the progress of neutrality in part because the declaration consecrated previously claimed neutral rights in a multilateral treaty ratified by all the great powers accepting the United States. And the United States would nevertheless adopt many of its principles during the subsequent US Civil War and the Spanish-American War of 1898. Still, the limits of neutral trading rights in time of war were repeatedly contested in the aftermath of the Crimean War. Without a clear delineation of the rules, as had occurred with the declaration of Paris, essential questions resurfaced repeatedly. Could neutral ship builders sell merchant vessels to the Confederacy during the US Civil War and then convert them into cruises on the open seas? Could neutral merchants freely trade in arms with France and Germany and move them into their unblockaded ports, as happened during the Franco-Prussian War? Could France declare rice contraband, as it did during the Sino-French War of 1884-5? Could Japan legitimately sink a neutral British passenger liner carrying Chinese troops, as it did during the first Sino-Japanese War? Could the United States cut neutral sub-oceanic telegraph cables leading to the Spanish territories of Cuba and the Philippines, as it did during the Spanish-American War? How might wireless telegraphy carried on neutral ships on the open seas be monitored and released? Could Russia sink neutral prizes at sea before they had been adjudicated in a price court, as happened during the Russo-Japanese War, including with the loss of some neutral cruise lives? All these issues created serious diplomatic situations with the potential to endanger the peaceful relationship between neutral and belligerent states. Clarity in what neutral governments and their subjects could and could not do was paramount to sustaining the balance of power across the world, at least from the perspective of the neutrals as much as from the perspective of belligerence. Such clarity was also sought by merchants, financiers, insurance brokers, bankers, telegraph companies, and anyone involved in the shipping industry. Neutrality handbooks, often written by international lawyers, proliferated anytime a war erupted. These advised companies and interested citizens on how to conduct their business across the seas and outlined the legal requirements of neutrality and belligerency. Newspapers, too, filled with articles describing the rules of war and the expected code of conduct of neutrals and belligerence alike, often with a focus on commercial issues. When disputes involved, as they inevitably did and certainly did in all the cases on this slide, lengthy editorials explained the legal and diplomatic complexities involved. 19th and early 20th century newspaper readers were well informed about neutrality and well understood the stakes for the maintenance of their society's wealth, well-being, and national and imperial prestige. Enterprising businesses, international law associations, and liberal internationalists across the world lobbied the governments to adopt ever more lenient neutrality rules to both protect the global economy from the harsh impact of war and to advance the peace of the seas for the movement of their private property and their people. So it's utterly unsurprising then that neutrality featured prominently in the negotiations at the two Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907. The 1899 conference extended the provisions of the 1864 Geneva Conventions to warfare at sea and created laws for the internment of belligerent soldiers found on in neutral sovereign territory, including on board neutral ships. The second Hague conference made considerably more progress on the limits of territorial waters, the laying of sea mines, the exemption for capture of post at sea, the conversion of merchant vessels into belligerent vessels on the open seas, and the right to colon and neutral harbours. Most importantly, the conference established the International Prize Court, a court of appeal to which private individuals and companies, mainly from neutral states, could take their grievances if and when a domestic belligerent price court decision went awry. The IPC was revolutionary. It was the first international court of appeal in existence. Its creation confirmed the principle that private individuals, as opposed to states, had inalienable rights. And above all, the IPC and the Hague conventions recognised the centrality of neutrality in the international environment and reinforced the expectation that neutrals would continue to feature prominently in modern warfare. But the 1907 Hague conference failed to do what many had hoped it would, namely to codify all the major laws of maritime war, at least the last number of them. Without a universally defined law of maritime law, the IPC for one could not sit. And these laws did come, or a large number of them came into being in London early in 1910. The declaration of London was even more neutrality-friendly than its Parisian predecessor of 1856. It offered a well-defined set of laws relaying the rights and duties of maritime powers in time of war, including classifying which resources could be declared contraband, the powers of blockade and their limits, and the abolition of continuous voyage. That Britain ultimately failed to actually ratify the declaration, which is rather ironic since they called for it, six and all something essential about the growth of neutral rights in the years leading up to the First World War as well. Namely, that it also inspired a fear that the adoption of these neutral rights would leave Britain as the world's foremost naval power, and here I'm invoking Phil and Morse protest of 1855, which was a continuous debate in Britain from the Crimean War on what to do about neutrality and belligerency given the need to maximise the power of the Royal Navy when the British Empire went to war. The debate on the contestation between neutral and belligerent rights consumed the British newspaper media throughout 1910 and March of 1911 and 1912. In the end, the House of Lords voted in favour of protecting the Royal Navy's belligerency and refused to ratify the declaration. And without Britain's adhesion to the declaration, the IPC could not be formed. Above all, the British debate about the declaration or the public debate around the declaration of London highlights how contestation between neutrality and belligerency was never straightforward. Between 1853 and 1914, naval strategists in every major state had to plan for a potential wartime future in which their country was either a belligerent or a neutral. And given that most neutral rights impeded belligerent rights and vice versa, how to advocate for a suitable balance between the was never easy and always contentious at almost every level of that you can imagine it was contentious. Between 1853 and 1914, however, the odds almost always in the end favoured neutral rights, where before 1815 and after 1914, they tended to favour belligerent rights. Yet for most naval powers in 1910 and 1914, even neutrality continued to win out. The other powers did ratify or attempted to ratify the declaration of London, for example. So at the outbreak of the First World War, Britain also declared it would adhere to its terms, the declarations terms, that is, if only to stable the global economy and its rights and power in it in the short term. So neutrality still defined the global landscape of maritime warfare at the outbreak of this global total war. But, of course, the dominance of neutrality did not mean that all belligerent rights were signed away. Nor did it mean that states did not invest in expanding their naval power. The naval razors of the turn of the century highlight just how significant they considered that power to be. The key to their naval planning revolved around understanding the need to prepare for the possibility of war and the likelihood of remaining neutral. As an example, consider how the German delegation at the Hague in 1907 presented a case to protect the rights of neutrals to trade with belligerents. This policy helped its war planning as much as it helped its own plans for being neutral, not least because several small but powerful trading nations like the Netherlands and the Scandinavian states ordered Germany, all of which were renowned long-term neutrals. From a German's perspective, a future British blockade, if it went to war with Britain, for example, may be surmounted if enough goods could be funneled by river or rail through its neutral neighbours. The German delegation at the Hague thus supported the creation of the international prize court. Protecting a neutral's right to trade then was as much part of the German naval platform in planning for war as building a sizable fleet of warships. Similarly, when Francis Jean Nicole strategist considered that a fleet of torpedo boats could keep the ships of a future enemy in port, they also supported the widening of neutral merchant rights. Meanwhile, the United States ongoing demand to clear all private property free of capture on the open seas reflected its government and, in many ways, its subject's expectation that it was unlikely to go to war with any major industrial and imperial rival in the near future. Here, too, Alfred May and his promotion of building up the United States as a strong naval power capable of asserting its grip on the sea, as he put it, set uncomfortably alongside its reputation as a staunchly neutral power willing and able to protect its neutral rights might as such made neutral right. It must be said that these neutrality expectations did not survive the First World War. That conflict witnessed a phenomenal expansion of belligerent rights supported by legal justifications that hiked back to the pre-1815 years. But to fixate on the First World War is the death of neutrality, which was a major debate among legal scholars certainly after 1917 when the United States ended its neutrality and went to war as the last neutral great power left in that war. By fixating on this death, one risks the minimization of the importance of neutrality and its expansion and the expansion of neutrality, neutral rights in law in the 19th century age of globalization and imperialism for between 1815 and 1914. So many of the world's industrial states came to rely heavily on these neutral rights to trade and freely access the open seas thereby helping them to expand their imperial power as well. Everyone's foreign and economic policies as well as the enable strategies accommodated this essential shift. That's me. Thank you. Oh, brilliant, Marcia. Thank you so much for that. I have so many questions. It's not even my period, but I just found that absolutely fascinating. So while I wait for the questions to come in by the chat, I will just actually kick off with one of my own. Can you tell us a little bit more about this international prize court and how it worked and did it ever actually come into play? Did it hear cases? What was the sort of political fallout of this? I am fascinated by this as an institution. Yeah, it's fascinating. I completely agree with you and there hasn't been very much scholarly attention paid to it. There's some but not very much in part because it never sat. But it was seriously intended to sit and it didn't sit because Britain didn't ratify the declaration of London and therefore there wasn't a well-defined set of laws. But the principle effectively was that a little bit like the permanent court of arbitration that was already established in the Hague, but for private companies not states. They could take their grievances when their ships were illegally sunk or illegally taken or they thought they were illegally taken and declared a prize in war by one of the belligerents, which occurred a lot during the Russo-Japanese War particularly, that there would be a course of appeal to a higher international body and it was to being effectively, it was a panel of international lawyers or representations from every state, almost all of which were neutral. So the neutral lawyers or the neutral judges would outnumber any belligerent judges and there would be a belligerent judge from each warring party as well present and they could rule saying no, you couldn't take that prize and you need to recompensate that company for the loss of goods and even the loss of life. So it caused issues in Britain on the issue of this, it wasn't the IPC that as much as anything was the issue as the notion that there might be a law that overruled British law and in the United States in the end there was a vast debate about it out overruling the Supreme Court. So there would have been issues, which is the well-known argument post 1918 that we hear for the United States non-adherence to other international courts, but it was already gurgling at this point as well. So it needs more attention, absolutely. No, that's great and then just sort of following on from that. So I was really fascinated by, so my research obviously focuses on the 18th century and just the beginning of the 19th century. So in my conception of neutrality, it is very much a bilateral conception, you know, in some ways Britain dominates in the thinking of neutrality but it's an Anglo-Spanish treaty or an Anglo-Dutch treaty and you, from your paper, I very much get the sense that this concept of bilateralism really shifts and becomes much more about sort of international congresses and actually international rules. Could you just, if that is correct, that could you just speak a bit about this transition and why you think it might happen? I'll tell you on the spot, I realize that's a huge question, but it just struck me as I was listening. Oh, that is a huge question. I think it's, I think it has everything to do with the insecurities of the end of the Napoleonic era and the recognition of the need of these victorious states. And I would actually label the United States one of these as well. This understanding that there is more to lose potentially in the world if there isn't some sort of multilateral, at least understanding that going to war with each other actually destabilizes interest in common. And so I think it's part of that wider congress system, which I would say it wasn't just a European conceptualization, it wasn't just something about the balance of power in Europe, but rather something that affected the transatlantic world more widely. And it plays out, I think one of the reasons that there is so much international law aside from the need for individuals to have a sense of security and how they conduct themselves over the seas and in spaces that are not defined by their own sovereign empire or state is this understanding that actually helps everyone to be more clear. So rather than having bilateral agreements, although there were bilateral agreements and all sorts of things, and the expansion of bilateral treaties was quite clear in the 19th century as well, but it was also about there are things we hold in common and these wars, these particularly when there were a large number of interstate wars, so as opposed to imperial wars where the war potentially risked a large number of other states' economic interests, access to ports and the seas, it almost demanded them to get together and say, all right, well it serves us all to kind of clarify what it is when we mean by a blockade in a way that shifts from that British we don't want to lose any of our rights, so we will agree to a treaty with this state in this moment for these reasons. And so it's kind of opening up those rights, although I still think Britain dominates and as it did in the early modern era as well and all that goes to custard in the first world war. Awesome, so our participants are feeling a bit shy, I don't know if it's because it's late in the evening here in Britain, so I'm just going to keep going because I have loads of questions to ask you. Luke has put their hands up. Oh I can't see that, oh I'm so sorry, yes please jump in, whoever has your hand up. Go ahead Lucas, go ahead. Okay, since we have talked about this in regard to my talk and neutrality being made in practice during the early modern period, I'd like to hear more about these neutrality handbooks that you have mentioned, it's a very basic question but so had the merchants who sought for clarity had any say in these in the creation of these handbooks or who was responsible for creating them and would love to just would just love to work with such a handbook for the early modern period. Well it's a great question and it was the real fun part of my research was to find them, so you know I did quite a bit of newspaper research in order to unpack sort of the public space engagement with neutrality and what I ended up discovering was there was an enormous amount of anxiety anytime there was war anywhere among neutral publics about their access to the world outside the borders of their state and the seas and shipping routes and investments and access to whatever overseas and this anxiety created a market and so you see public not just newspapers responding, the lawyers write articles for newspapers explaining what continuous voyage means or what it means when a ship gets seized by a belligerent power and gets taken into a prize court and what one's rights are and a large number some of it's about humanitarianism so what should one's duty be to the victims of war as well so it's not just a well it is all self-serving in the end but it's it's about defining expectations and trying to create and also crying trying to create opportunities so it's also about where can I profit the most from what's happening but it's the anxiety the inability to imagine if the ship that's already left port and is heading to somewhere where there might be military engagement at sea or we're going to get to might not be able to get to a port or might be intercepted and I might lose everything that's where it came from they're largely written by lawyers I don't know whether they were instigated by request but it's certainly to meet this market and they must have solved well because I found dozens and dozens of them so you can find them pretty easily in even on the internet archive.org at the moment if you typed in neutrality and the date of a particular war 1904-05 is particularly useful you'll find them they're there and their and their prologues are all about I hope the ordinary subject or the ordinary citizen finds this a useful guide to what's going on and helps them with their day-to-day business. Not speaking of the 18th century. No thank you very much and thank you for getting up so early. Oh that's a pleasure I'm sorry I missed your paper. Thanks Marta. David Morgan Owen has a question for you so I'll just read it out to you. So he says to what extent did different national legal traditions conflict in the formation of international law before 1914? In particularly do you see a schism between Anglo-U.S. and German-European conceptions? Well that's a really fascinating question because there's a large amount of historiography that would claim that there is this constant schism that the European legal tradition is quite different from the Anglo-American one. What I found most in terms of neutrality was that there wasn't a schism so much between the Europeans and the British but rather between the British and the Americans and it was generally about interpreting neutral rights so the reason the United States didn't then sign up for the declaration of power was because they wanted all private property to be immune from capture and therefore dispensing with a large number of neutrality laws including contraband and so forth. What you do see is in 1907 at the Hague and I'm not so well read on the how the scholars engage on this but more on how the diplomacy of it evolved. We did do see Britain in 1907 offering to do away with contraband altogether but and to favor protecting blockading rights and there is a moment there that you see real tension certainly with the Germans who who want the exact who don't want who don't want the blockading rights to be sustained and the Germans respond by suggesting that sea mines ought to be and the rights to lay sea mines should ought to be extended so that a belligerent can protect its ports from being blockaded if you lay enough mines in the in the harbor mouth then no effective blockade can take take part so there are those kinds of contestations but there are about strategic interests and planning for war not so much about the differences in legal interpretations and I guess what the point here is is an argument that Stephen Neff so beautifully makes in his book the rights and duties of neutrals which is neutrality in law is often more product of the engagement between the needs of war and states so circumstantial as opposed to being a product of how legal scholars engage with each other having said that there was a large amount of legal commentary on neutrality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well I'm not sure that quite is a depression but just to continue that kind of line then you'd raised a number of the kind of issues that led up to the thinking of 1914 but I'm interested because certainly throughout the war you see the American civil war as being such an important part of precedent particularly in that Anglo-American relationship and I just wondered kind of going back to David's question I mean with the other three bigger belligerents the Spanish the Netherlands and Norway what you know kind of take on the American civil war and the lessons do they get out of it in terms of precedent do they use it much during the actual draw you know the drawing up of their response to 1914 and particularly here I'm thinking you know Nick Lambert's book on planning for Armageddon just their their positioning and I just wondered what the what their their take on on that particular precedent is another great question um one of the one of the things that's quite clear from the longer term neutral so the long the the the states European states particularly but not just European states the states that set themselves up as neutrals in any circumstance unless they're at war themselves is that they both um really mobilized the accepted multilateral agreements so the the hate conventions and and they create at the start of a conflict most of them created declarations that they announced to the world saying we're going to be neutral regardless these are the rules and laws we will uphold within our borders these are the expectations we have of belligerence and and often they exceeded the requirements by law in order to be seen to be as neutral as possible and in some cases like in Belgium and Switzerland they exceeded expectations by for example they they they issued prohibitions on the sale of armaments during wars certainly after the Franco-Prussian war in order to not be seen as favoring one or other side militarily so to minimize the chance that they might be invaded so in 1914 when the First World War breaks out um they all do that um and it's not until Britain declares you know so it's not that they're invoking the United States civil war as such they're invoking many of the principles that came into agreement and being afterwards um one of the and in many ways they're not just looking at the US civil war they're looking at the walls of the 1860s they're looking at at all the walls that I listed before and all the issues that have gone before and they're trying to mitigate the um the possibility that they might be drawn into this conflict by not upholding something that would that they imagine would be expected of them as neutral so it's about them balancing the politics of it the economics of it and the legality of it um but they invoke the past including the US civil war and other things whenever there isn't um there is an issue and every time any of the neutrality laws are breached by a belligerent they protest to that belligerent to say your U boat entered our waters we picked it up we've interned it you can't get your crew back we're keeping the U boat in our port until the end of the war your crew is going to be interned in a camp until the end of the war because you breached our neutrality this is how we are safe saving our neutrality for uh for the future one thing I do want to say is that um the US civil war um create in the end um the neutrality obligations in law in international law were actually um after the US civil war they were by agreement of the British and the Americans were titans so the Alabama case was um arbitrated uh in Geneva in 1871 in the midst of the Franco-Prussian war and it kind of embedded this notion that and it quite clearly said states cannot sell ships to neutral states can't sell ships to belligerent navies when there is an expectation that ship might be used for warring uh conduct and this principle um the principle of due diligence that neutral governments had due diligence requirement to police the behavior of their subjects and citizens um came into being um and it was related to the obligations of neutrality and while the due diligence course itself was removed in 1907 the implication that states ought to police their neutrality um was sustained so there was a immense expectation on behalf of the the Norwegians and the and the Dutch and the Belgians and the Swiss and everyone else who was neutral um at the outbreak of the war certainly when the war was contained to Serbia, Austria and even and then as it expanded they were really really focused on defending and protecting their neutral uh their their legal obligations as well as their diplomatic uh the diplomatic implications of of their status and behaviors. Great thank you very much right brilliant session and we're going to keep on that vein in about three minutes time we'll ask you to come back and Martin Robson will join us and uh we'll we're gonna we're gonna keep on this world war one tour now for a little while so see you all back here in just a